He broke off suddenly. “Lord, make men as towers,” he added quietly after a while, and nobody spoke for many minutes. To Taffy this had seemed a very queer saying; about as queer as that other one about “men as trees walking.” Somehow--he could not say why--he had never asked any questions about it. But many times he had perched himself on a flat tombstone under the church tower at home, and tilted his head back and stared up at the courses and pinnacles, wondering what his father could have meant, and how a man could possibly be like a tower. It ended in this--that whenever he dreamed about his father, these two towers, or a tower which was more or less a combination of both, would get mixed up with the dream as well. The gate-house contained a sitting-room and three bedrooms (one hardly bigger than a box-cupboard); but a building adjoined it which had been the old Franciscans’ refectory, though now it was divided by common planking into two floors, the lower serving for a feoffee office, while the upper was supposed to be a muniment-room, in charge of the feoffees’ clerk. The clerk used it for drying his garden-seeds and onions, and spread his hoarding apples to ripen on the floor. So when Taffy grew to need a room of his own, and his father’s books to cumber the very stairs of the gate-house, the money which Humility and her mother made by their lace-work, and which arrived always by post, came very handy for the rent which the clerk asked for his upper chamber. Carpenters appeared and partitioned it off into two rooms, communicating with the gate-house by a narrow doorway pierced in the wall. All this, whilst it was doing, interested Taffy mightily; and he announced his intention of being a carpenter one of these days. “I hope,” said Humility, “you will look higher, and be a preacher of God’s Word, like your father.” His father frowned at this and said: “Jesus Christ was both.” Taffy compromised: “Perhaps I’ll make pulpits.” This was how he came to have a bedroom with a vaulted roof and a window that reached down below the floor. CHAPTER II. MUSIC IN THE TOWN SQUARE. This window looked upon the Town Square, and across it to the Mayoralty. The square had once been the Franciscans’ burial-ground, and was really no square at all, but a semicircle. The townspeople called it Mount Folly. The chord of the arc was formed by a large Assize Hall, with a broad flight of granite steps, and a cannon planted on either side of the steps. The children used to climb about these cannons, and Taffy had picked out his first letters from the words _Sevastopol_ and _Russian Trophy_, painted in white on their lead-coloured carriages.